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W W W. M A I N E B I Z . B I Z 13 J U LY 8 , 2 0 2 4 H E A L T H C A R E / W E L L N E S S and FCHN's chief medical officer who has worked in both rural and urban settings. "A lot of people don't think they could practice rurally, but when they see what it's like to live and prac- tice in a rural setting, it's a lot less daunting," he says. Upgrades in Piscataquis County In-house training is also a priority at Northern Light Mayo Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft, a 4,550-popula- tion town in Piscataquis County. One example is a nursing program at the hospital in collaboration with Eastern Maine Community College that's hosted two cohorts to date. Out of 10 graduates so far, seven are still working at Mayo. However, without enough graduates from Maine nursing programs to fill staffing shortages, the hospital continues to employ travel nurses, who are three times more expensive. "Our goal is to have 100% of our own employed nurses. We make progress every week on that, but that will take a while," says Vienneau, whose child- hood admiration for Florence Nightingale inspired her own career in nursing. "I always said I was going to be a nurse when I was a little kid, but I never said I was going to be a health care administrator," she says outside the leafy grounds of Mayo, which recently reconfigured its emergency department. "You don't have to look far to see you're making a difference in the community when you're in a very small place like this." About 45 minutes away in the 1,530-popula- tion town of Greenville, she also leads Northern Light CA Dean. It's Maine's smallest hospi- tal with just 15 beds in a brand-new $27 million building with new equipment from a CT scanner to modern lab analyzers — a far cry from the equipment that hospitals used to share back and forth in Vienneau's nursing days. "In rural areas, you have to be extremely creative in how you provide the service so that people in your community can have access," she says, highlighting the entrepreneurial nature of running a rural hospital. "You have to be not afraid to try new things." Another innovation at CA Dean Hospital is a mobile mammography unit purchased with more than $1 million in congressionally directed funds and supported by a $160,000 Maine Cancer Foundation grant to employ a women's health advocate to identify patients who are due or overdue for screenings, get them scheduled and arrange transportation if needed. e mobile unit is outfitted with the same 3D technology used in hospitals to produce high-qual- ity images and aims to mirror what patients would find in any hospital-based mammography set- ting. e unit, based in Greenville but also often in Monson, has screened 100 patients so far. Next month, the aim is to start going to the Jackman Community Health Center, which is owned by Penobscot Community Health Care, and other communities after that. C O N T I N U E D O N F O L L OW I N G PA G E » Marie Vienneau, president of Northern Light CA Dean and Mayo Hospitals, at the facility in Dover-Foxcroft. P H O T O / J I M N E U G E R F O C U S

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